The Mrzli ridge keeps the snow longest. From the war-cemetery wall above Kobarid you see it, even in May, a chalk line drawn over a green slope.

Arriving in Kobarid

We came in from Tolmin on the slow road, the one that hugs the river instead of cutting across the fields. Spring had loosened the larch — the new needles were a colour you could taste, somewhere between mint and apple. The Soča below us was full and unhurried, the green of it almost embarrassing in its plainness.

Kobarid is a small place that knows its weight. There is a square, a church, a butcher, a museum that has won prizes across Europe for the way it tells a story most countries would prefer to fold and put away. We left the car by the school and walked.

The footbridge over the Soča, on the lower section of the Walk of Peace.

The Italian charnel house

The Italian charnel house sits on a hill called Gradič, in three concentric rings of pale stone. It was built in 1938 — the bones of more than seven thousand soldiers were carried up from twelve smaller cemeteries scattered across the front. From the top tier you can see the river, and the mountains, and the lower town. The wind that day was small and dry.

You walk among the names and after a while they stop being names. They become the rhythm of a long, low song.

— Walking notes, April 12

A pair of swallows had nested in one of the side niches, and the volunteer who tends the place had marked the spot with a paper note in three languages, asking us to step lightly. It was the gentlest thing I saw all week.

Above the Soča gorge

From Gradič the marked path drops back through the village and crosses to the western bank of the Soča. The route — the Walk of Peace — runs for nearly five hundred kilometres, but the loop above Kobarid is short, three hours at a slow gait, and it concentrates the war into something the body can hold.

You hear the river before you see it again, and the sound is the same sound it has been making for a thousand years.

You pass trenches dug into limestone, log-walled shelters, a small chapel, a rusted stretcher leaning where someone left it eighty years ago and no one has wanted to move. The trees are doing the slow work of forgetting on the hillside's behalf.

Practical notes

  • Getting there. Bus or car from Ljubljana via Idrija (≈ 2h30). The valley road is narrow but kind.
  • Where to stay. Hiša Sonca and Hotel Hvala in Kobarid; agroturism in Drežnica for less price.
  • Where to eat. Hiša Franko (book ahead), Topli Val for fish, Pri Tinetu for štruklji.
  • When. May for snow on the ridges + green below. September for empty trails and warm water.
  • Trail. Walk of Peace, Kobarid loop. 7 km · 250 m gain · 3 hours.
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